Episodios

  • Wanted Man
    Sep 3 2023
    GPM # 26 Youth and protest. These are words that go together well. Older folks protest too. Many have been doing it for years. Michael Polanyi was in his twenties when he committed his first act of public disobedience. I recall walking into a room back then, seeing Michael getting his blood drawn. It would end up getting tossed on an outer wall of the Canadian Department of War, in protest against low-level jet fighter training in Labrador, over indigenous Innu land. Fast forward. Michael is now sixty, and still protesting. Just the other day, worried about wildfires sweeping across Canada – thousands of them, devastating splendid forests; sending colossal volumes of CO2 into Earth’s atmosphere – Michael hopped into a car, drove over to a big highway outside Ottawa, and … Well, listen to Michael tell the story in today’s podcast. Click ‘play’ above, or go here. Michael Polanyi studied engineering, physics, political science and ecology at various Canadian universities. He was an assistant professor of health studies at the University of Regina. He’s particularly interested in participatory action research, where people design and implement research on matters that affect them. Climate protest in Ottawa Canadian musicians hungry for air play (fame and fortune, if they’re lucky) head down to the USA. Marcel Soulodre did. A native of St. Boniface, Manitoba, Winnipeg’s Francophone sister city, Marcel spent a few years in Louisiana and toured the States extensively. Then, in search of deeper roots, he moved to lovely Strasbourg, France, on the German border. Johnny Cash is huge in this part of the world, and Marcel Soulodre channels Johnny Cash very well. Here’s a story about Marcel – aka M. Soul. Click on the ‘play’ button on top, or go here. And check out Marcel’s tour dates here. M. Soul wows Epfig crowd (David Kattenburg) Are you disenchanted with politics? Do politicians turn you off? You’re not the only one. Vote for me, they shout, promising the moon and stars. They slag other politicians, yelling at each other in their chambers. Some of them take money from powerful corporations. When they’re through with politics, into some corporate law firm or directors board they go. Sure, most politicians are honest and conscientious, but their congresses and parliaments are poorly equipped to solve huge, complex challenges like climate change, that require unity, consensus, imagination and courage. Courtesy Citizens’ Assembly, Dublin On the other hand, citizens’ assemblies, made up of ordinary people from all walks of life, are much better suited to problem-solving in dark times. I spoke about citizens’ assemblies with Ansel Herz, Communications Director for an organization that promotes them — DemocracyNext. Listen to our conversation. Click on the play button on top, or go here. Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his wonderful guitar instrumentals.
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    59 m
  • The First 9-11
    Sep 9 2023
    GPM # 27 Fifteen months after the US Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson, overturning fifty years of abortion rights, millions of American women and girls face deteriorating access to reproductive health care. This is the finding of a group of human rights experts, communicated in a recent letter to the US government. Abortion services are now banned in fifteen US states, and sharply restricted in seven. So are a host of other fundamental rights, the experts say: to privacy, bodily integrity, autonomy, freedom of thought and conscience. Disadvantaged women and girls have been especially hard hit. Health care providers have been chilled, even in States where abortion is still legal. Threats of violence are common. And, law enforcement officials are using electronic data to track and pursue women. Reem Alsalem was the lead author of the letter. Alsalem is Special UN Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences. I reached Reem Alsalem in Amman, Jordan. Listen to our conversation. Tap the podcast play button on top, or go here. Listen to our complete conversation here: It’s that time of year again – time to commemorate the 22nd anniversary of 9-11. Also time to commemorate the first 9-11, fifty years ago. On September 11, 1973, in a brutal coup backed by the CIA, Chile’s democratically elected socialist leader, Salvador Allende, was ousted, then killed. Over the following weeks, a hundred thousand Chileans would be detained in Santiago’s national stadium. Thousands were tortured, killed outright or disappeared. All under the beneficent gaze of the Nixon Administration and its foreign policy chief, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. North of the US border, Canadian officials were also pleased. Indeed, in cooperation with Washington, Pierre Trudeau’s government helped destabilize Chile’s economy. Yves Engler has written extensively about Canadian involvement in the Chilean coup. Here and here and here. Engler is a Montreal-based writer and political commentator. Listen to our conversation. Tap the podcast play button on top, or go here. Listen to our complete conversation here: Imagine an entire nation of imprisoned people. Thousands behind bars. Millions more within their own communities, hemmed in by walls, checkpoints and armed colonists, and a panoply of regulations restricting their movement; constantly surveilled; their most intimate details and relationships digitized; blackmailed into informing on each other. Instructions to Bethlehem Palestinians (David Kattenburg) This is the situation in Israeli-occupied Palestine. The numbers are startling. Since Israel’s conquest of the West Bank, in 1967, almost a million Palestinians have been jailed – most of them inside Israel, in flagrant breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Tens of thousands without charge; and children, routinely subjected to what experts call torture. In a recent report to the UN Human Rights Council, Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in occupied Palestine, laid out Israel’s carceral system in graphic detail – a system she says has turned occupied Palestine into a “constantly surveilled open-air panopticon.” Listen to our conversation. Tap the podcast play button on top, or go here. Listen to our complete conversation here: Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his fabulous guitar instrumentals.
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  • Gut Microbes & Hospital Wine
    Sep 16 2023
    GPM # 28 You are what you eat, so they say. As it happens, the trillions of bacteria living in your gut eat what you eat, and turn meals into molecules that boost your health and spirit – if you feed them well. I spoke about the gut microbiome with Genelle Lunken-Healey. Healey specializes in the influence of dietary fibre on gut bacteria. She’s a registered dietitian and Assistant Professor in the Division of Gastroenterology and Nutrition at the University of British Columbia. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast edition. Click on the play button on top, or go here. Trillions of bacteria live in your gut. What you eat, they eat. Gut microbes enjoy a balanced diet, with lots of fiber, fresh fruit, vegetables and nuts. They also enjoy good drink. How about alcohol? It’s a question science has been debating for years. Of course, moderation is always advised. Is a glass or two of red wine actually good for your health? Or will it send you on a trip to the hospital? If you live in Strasbourg, France, it may well. Strasbourg Civic Hospital is one of France’s oldest medical institutions – as large as a small town, with a staff of over ten thousand. In the basement of the hospital’s administration building, there’s a wine cellar. Here, the finest wines from France’s Alsace region are available at a reasonable cost. Wine casks cleaning (David Kattenburg) Strasbourg’s Cave Historique des Hospices is a tourist destination – and you don’t have to buy wine. You can just wander through the cool, dimly-lit cellar, gawking at giant oak casks and reading about how the hospital got into the wine business six hundred years ago. Paying for health care was what it was all about. The hospital’s wealthiest patients forked out gold. Others handed paid with livestock, houses … or vineyards. Over time, the hospital became one of Alsace’s biggest vineyard owner. Groundwater levels are high in Strasbourg. So, like the city’s famous cathedral, the Civil Hospital’s wine cellar is supported by pillars built atop tree trunks up to five meters tall. “Fondacion sur pilotis,” the system is called. Along the walls of the cellar, huge oak casks filled with wines produced by twenty-seven vintners from across Alsace. All of the region’s illustrious vintages are here: Riesling, Pinot Gris, Gewurztraminer, Sylvaner, Pinot Blanc, Pinot Noir and Pinot Auxerrois. Also a pair of unusual cépages: Klevinger de Heiligenstein, from the village of Heiligenstein, thirty kilometers southwest of Strasbourg, and from the village of Ammerschwihr, a short drive west of Colmar, Alsace’s only blended grand cru, Grand Cru Kaefferkopf: sixty percent gewurtztraminer and forty percent of other grape types. Sticking out of each cask – a shiny spigot that opens with a “paradise key.” Alsatian vintners have paid for these casks to be refurbished. Still, storage costs must be covered. This is where the cellar’s wine shop comes in. Upon maturation, a small percentage of the wines in the Civic Hospital’s cellar will be bottled for sale. Some physicians are uncomfortable with the arrangement. But fine wines are prestigious in France – none more so than the 540 year-old wine stored at the very end of the Civic Hospital’s cellar — an Alsatian white wine from 1472. Behind a heavily locked steel gate, five hundred liters of the precious fluid sit tranquilly in a specially-built oak cask. Thibaut Baldinger and cask of very old wine Nearby, an enormous oak cask lies on its side. It’s empty now, but once contained twenty-six thousand liters of Pommard — enough to fill 34,000 bottles. Through a hallway and into another room, something most tourists don’t visit. Here, hundreds of years ago, corpses were dissected by doctors and students — many of them who’d just been executed by drowning at Strasbourg’s nearby Pont Corbeau. Strasbourg Civic Hospital’s historic wine cellar is open to visitors from 8:30 till 5:30, Mondays to Fridays; Saturdays till noon. Listen to this story in today’s podcast edition. Click on the play button on top, or go here. Thibaut Baldinger serves up a glass of chilled Alsatian cremant (David Kattenburg) A much darker story: In the annals of racist terrorism, few acts were more hideous or cowardly than the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Sixty years ago — shortly before 10:30 a.m. on Sunday, September 15, 1963 — nineteen sticks of dynamite attached to a timing device blew out a hole two-meters wide in the eighty year-old church’s back wall, and a half meter-deep hole in its basement. The blast knocked a passing motorist from his car, blew out windows blocks away and could be heard and felt across town. Five girls were in the church’s basement at the time, preparing for a sermon entitled “A Rock That Will Not Roll.” Four were killed: Carol Denise McNair was eleven. Addie May Collins, Carole Rosamond Robertson and Cynthia ...
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    56 m
  • Lake Chad Drying Up
    Sep 24 2023
    GPM # 29 In response to the heightening climate crisis, UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres warned last week that humanity has “opened the gates of Hell” and is “hurtling towards disaster, eyes wide open.” Days before, a team of scientists spelled out humanity’s predicament in drier fashion. Six out of nine planetary systems key to the survival of the human species are under threat, they report, breaching the estimated boundaries of Earth system stability and resilience and pushing our planet “well outside of the safe operating space for humanity.” The GPM spoke with the lead author of the report, Katherine Richardson. Richardson is principal investigator at the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate and Professor of Biological Oceanography at the University of Copenhagen. She co-authored the groundbreaking 2009 study that introduced the Planetary Boundaries/Safe Operating Space concepts. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Listen to our complete conversation here: Lake Chad is drying up. Poised at the spot where Niger, Chad, Cameroon and Nigeria meet, the freshwater body has lost an estimated seventy percent of its volume due to water extraction — from the lake itself and its upstream sources — and as the result of climate change. Courtesy: Nidhi Nagabhatla Several inter-basin water transfer projects have been put forward to restore the lake, involving Italian and Chinese investors, the African Union and a host of international development institutions. The biggest project, on the drawing board since the 1970s, would involve the creation of a 2400-kilometer-long canal between Lake Chad and the Congo River, with power generation stations along the way. Another proposal envisions a shorter canal between the lake and a pair of reservoirs to be built on a tributary of the Congo River, the Ubangi. Opposed by the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and European scientists, both projects remain on the drawing board. Their potential impact on one of Africa’s most endangered wetland ecosystems, and on the livelihoods of fishers and pastoralists along Lake Chad’s shores, continues to be the subject of study and debate. Nidhi Nagabhatla has been studying the various ‘discourse coalitions’ on one side and other. Nagabhatla is a Senior Research Fellow in the Climate Change and Natural Resources program at United Nations University and an Adjunct Professor at the School of Earth, Environment & Society at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Listen to our complete conversation here:
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  • Henrietta Lacks’ Immortal Cells
    Oct 1 2023
    GPM # 30 Henrietta Lacks — not a household name. Lacks was a black woman. The daughter of Virginia sharecroppers, she ended up in Baltimore. There, around the age of thirty, she came down with cervical cancer. In the course of surgery, in the ‘coloured ward’ at Johns Hopkins hospital, unbeknownst to her, a piece of her cervix was removed, then passed along to a medical researcher. Henrietta Lacks (Courtesy Lacks family) Henrietta Lacks died of her cancer. Her cells turned out to be immortal, doing what no line of cultured human cells had ever done: reproduce indefinitely in lab dishes. HeLa cells, as they came to be known, revolutionized biomedical research. Among the advances they leveraged — the polio vaccine, treatment for sickle cell anemia and in vitro fertilization. HeLa cells also generated huge profit for a company called Thermo Fisher Scientific. The Lacks family never saw a penny. Indeed, advanced medical treatments made possible by HeLa cells were beyond their means. In 2021, the Lacks family launched a lawsuit against Thermo Fisher. In early August, the case was settled for an undisclosed sum. I spoke about Henrietta Lacks and medical racism in America with Dorothy Roberts. Roberts is Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, and the director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society at U. Penn’s Center for Africana Studies. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Listen my complete conversation with Dorothy Roberts here: Courtesy: Aghirin’man Uranium mining is not the business it used to be. What with Fukushima and the shift to clean wind and solar, fewer reactors are being built and more are being decommissioned. What’s a profit-hungry uranium mining company to do? Head to Niger, in north-central Africa. It’s the world’s seventh largest producer of the radioactive element. Icing on the cake – Nigerien environmental regulations are lax and weakly applied. Massive volumes of Nigerien uranium have been dug by French state-owned Orano, outside the northern town of Arlit. Now, a pair of Canadian companies have arrived. At another spot near Arlit, Toronto-based Global Atomic is digging a shaft, aiming to market uranium — including to one of North America’s largest utilities — by 2025. BC-based GoviEx has yet to begin exploiting one of the world’s largest uranium deposits, at Madaouela, also near Arlit. Niger is “mining-friendly,” GoviEx says. I spoke about the uranium mining industry, uranium mining in Niger and these two Canadian companies with Gunter Wippel. Wippel is a veteran anti-nuclear campaigner in Germany and helps run a group called the Uranium Network. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here. Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his fabulous guitar instrumentals.
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    59 m
  • Old Nazis & International Law
    Oct 8 2023
    GPM # 31 Back in the early 2000s, Dutch chemist Paul Crützen suggested that humans have pushed Planet Earth into a brand new age, terminating the one geologists say we’ve been in for the past 12,000 years, the Holocene. The Anthropocene, Crützen called his proposed, human-engineered Epoch. This past spring, a scientific panel presented its own geological definition of the Anthropocene. The core of that definition — the Anthropocene’s ‘Golden Spike’, the one spot on Earth where the start of Earth’s proposed new Epoch is best observed in surface sediments. The panel’s choice — Crawford Lake, in southern Ontario. Crawford Lake is meromictic, so its waters don’t turn over and its bottom sediments remain perfectly preserved. Those sediments have been recording human activities for 12,000 years, beginning with First Nations activities dating back to the late 13th century. Sedimentary layers laid down in the mid-19th century record the logging activities of European settlers along the lake’s shores. Layers dating to the mid-20th century — the proposed time base of the Anthropocene — contain the chemical signatures of fossil fuel burning and atmospheric nuclear weapons testing. The Anthropocene Working Group’s proposed geological definition of the Anthropocene – with Crawford Lake as the new Epoch’s Golden Spike – will be submitted to its parent body, a subcommission of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, later this Fall. A final decision, rejecting or adopting the Anthropocene as a new Epoch in Earth’s history, could be announced in August 2024, at the 37th congress of the International Union of Geological Sciences, in South Korea. I visited Crawford Lake in the company of some of its greatest fans. The first one you’ll hear is Brenna Bartley, Manager of Education & Outreach with Halton Region Conservation Authority. Listen to our conversation. Click on the play button above, or go here. Coring Crawford Lake sediments. Mike Pisaric (standing), Tim Patterson (kneeling) and Chelsi McNeill-Jewer (laying down). (Courtesy Patterson Lab) Videoed sessions of the Canadian House of Commons don’t usually go viral. Late last month, a seemingly innocent act of courtesy by the Commons Speaker sparked national furor and global media coverage. Moments after a speech by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, House Speaker Anthony Rota called on MPs to stand up and applaud an elderly man sitting in the visitors’ balcony. Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old Ukrainian veteran, had valiantly fought the Russians in World War Two, Rota declared. Everyone rose and clapped, with great emotion, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland among them. As it turns out, Yaroslav Hunka was a veteran of one of Nazi Germany’s most notorious divisions, the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician). Under the command of Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, one of Nazi Germany’s most powerful leaders and Holocaust architects, the Galician Division committed atrocious crimes across western Ukraine and Poland. Hunka was eighteen years-old when he volunteered. His political beliefs at that time are unknown, and there’s no evidence he participated in atrocities. Some time in the mid-1950s, Hunka emigrated to Canada. So did hundreds of other veterans of Nazi units, as documented by the 1985-86 Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada (Deschênes Commission). Monuments would be erected across Canada, commemorating their ‘courageous’ struggles. In more recent years, that sentiment has been shared by Chrystia Freeland. Freeland’s own grandfather was the senior editor of a Nazi newspaper in occupied Poland, something she has been circumspect about in public. The GPM spoke with Dimitri Lascaris about Yaroslav Hunka, and Canada’s reputation as a place where old Nazis went to pasture. Lascaris is a lawyer, human rights activist and journalist. Listen to our conversation. Click on the play button above, or go here. Dimitri Lascaris Back in 2019, in the midst of another Canadian scandal, Chrystia Freeland, Foreign Minister at the time, declared that international law wasn’t a “smorgasbord to pick and choose from.” Freeland was being coy. When it comes to China or Russia or Iran or Syria or Venezuela or other countries of that sort, Canada calls for international law to be strictly enforced, and even gets involved. On the other hand, when it comes to Israel, Canada calls for international law to be waived. Late last December, along with two dozen other Israeli allies, Canada voted against a UN resolution requesting the International Court of Justice to render an Advisory Opinion on the legal consequences of Israel’s half-century-long occupation of Palestine. The resolution passed by a wide margin, and the ICJ is now preparing to render that opinion. International Court of Justice, Den Haag This past July, in a letter to the Court, Canada urged it to ...
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    58 m
  • Everybody Crying Mercy
    Oct 15 2023
    GPM # 32 In anticipation of an Israeli ground invasion, thousands of Gazans are now fleeing the northern half of the tiny enclave, already devastated by sixteen years of brutal siege. Destruction in Gaza Israel’s imminent invasion comes in response to last weekend’s horrific assault on Israeli communities east of its Gaza ghetto. In the wake of that attack, the Israeli military ordered Gaza’s 1.1 million northern residents to get out. Tens of thousands are now trying to do so. Thirteen hundred Israelis perished in last weekend’s terrorist attack by Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants. Most were civilians. A hundred and fifty were taken hostage. Three hundred soldiers were killed, including high-ranking officers. According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, over 2300 Gazans have been killed by retaliatory Israeli strikes, including 700 children. Seventy died in an airstrike on Friday, including children, in the course of heeding Israeli evacuation demands. Ten thousand have been wounded. In a news release this past Friday, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons declared that Israel’s evacuation order — after cutting off food, water, electricity and fuel to Gaza, then dropping 6000 bombs, some of them reportedly white phosphorus munitions – constitutes ‘forcible transfer’ and ‘collective punishment,’ crimes against humanity under international law. Nothing new for the people of Gaza. Three-quarters of the enclave’s 2.3 million residents are already refugees, or the descendants of refugees driven from their villages by Zionist militias between late 1947 and 1949. The lovely Israeli communities brutally invaded by Palestinian militants last weekend lie on or near the ruins of those villages — an irony mainstream media has ignored. The GPM spoke about the unfolding situation in Gaza and Israel with Michael Lynk. Lynk is Associate Professor of law at Western University, in London, Ontario, specializing in labour, human rights, disability, constitutional and administrative law. Between 2016 and 2022, Lynk served as ‘UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967’. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button on top, or go here. Listen to our complete conversation here: In search of ways to describe the world today, songwriters and poets are never at a loss for words. It’s a crazy mixed up world … Well fed masters reap the harvests of the polluted seeds they’ve sown … The gambling man is rich and the working man is poor … Everybody’s crying ‘peace on Earth’ — just as soon as we win this war. In search of a scholarly explanation for the world’s woes, I spoke with Radhika Desai. Desai is Professor in the Department of Political Studies and Director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba, Canada, and Convenor of the International Manifesto Group. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button on top, or go here. Listen to our complete conversation with Radhika Desai here: Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his wonderful guitar instrumentals.
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    59 m
  • Risky Moves
    Oct 22 2023
    GPM # 33 Nothing more powerful than a risky personal act. Consider Greta Thunberg. Or Gianluca Grimalda. When Grimalda’s German bosses told the Italian climate researcher to return to work fast, from the other side of the planet, Grimalda declined. A 32-hour airplane journey from Papua New Guinea to Germany would generate 5.3 tonnes of Earth-warming CO2, Grimalda insisted. Slow travel – by ocean freighter and train — would generate 420 kilos. Twelve times less. He’d come back slow. Gianluca Grimalda Grimalda got the boot. A hard hit, but Grimalda is philosophical. He’d told the 1800 participants in his climate research project, in Bougainville, that he’d travel back to Europe low-carbon, and he didn’t want to be seen as a giaman – a liar or fraudster in the Solomon Islands language. Moreover, honest researchers are the foundation of credible climate science, Grimalda reasoned. The GPM reached Gianluca Grimalda on a freighter docked in Rabaul, East New Britain, on the Bismarck archipelago of Papua New Guinea, at the start of his slow journey back to Germany. Listen to our conversation. Click on the play button above, or go here. Listen to our complete conversation here: Gianluca Grimalda’s slow travel trajectory One of the best parts of academic research is going to conferences, in far off places. Earlier this month, Canadian political scientist Radikha Desai travelled to Russia (by plane, not boat) to attend a forum organized by the Valdai Discussion Club, an annual talk-fest for Russian academics, diplomats and politicians. Vladimir Putin typically attends. Radhika Desai Desai is interested in this kind of stuff. The University of Manitoba political scientist has written extensively on US hegemony, globalization and contemporary imperialism, from a critical Marxist perspective. Among her positions – that the US and NATO provoked Russia into invading Ukraine, and that the war, now into its eighteenth bloody month, is actually an American proxy war on Russia. So, definitely beyond mainstream. As it happens, here in Canada, the Valdai Discussion Club is beyond the pale. Last September, Ottawa slapped sanctions on it for “generating and disseminating disinformation and propaganda.” As if this didn’t put Desai in a delicate spot, Vladimir Putin answered her submitted question. What did Russia’s president think about that standing ovation 98-year-old Ukrainian veteran Yaroslav Hunka got in the Canadian Parliament for fighting the Russians in World War II, on the side of the Nazis? Putin’s answer, nuanced and diplomatic, sent ripples across global media and a flood of hate mail into her inbox. Desai’s question – her mere presence at the forum – was “morally reprehensible” and “pretty horrendous,” one Canadian right-winger declared. Her students support her. Radikha Desai is Professor in the Department of Political Studies and Director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at the University of Manitoba, and Convenor of the International Manifesto Group. The GPM spoke with her about her risky move, and her thoughts on the Russia-Ukraine war. Listen to our conversation. Click on the play button above, or go here. Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his wonderful guitar instrumentals.
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    59 m